ABSTRACT

In his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint Brentano divides all existing phenomena into the psychological and the physical. In order to distinguish these two kinds of phenomenon, he offers six criteria for psychological phenomena. The most important is undoubtedly the notion of intentionality.1 “Every mental phenomenon,” Brentano argues,

is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. (Brentano 1995, 88)

Brentano was soon criticized for characterizing the intentional object as a mental entity. While this characterization might help to explain cases like hallucinations, imaginations of fictional objects, or dreams, where the corresponding object typically does not exist in the physical world, at least not in the way represented, it runs into problems when we consider the most common cases of perception. When I see a table, for example, it is essential that the actual table, the physical object, is in front of me. In my perception I am directed towards this physical object, and not towards some mental entity. Brentano’s account of intentionality, thus, leads to an unnecessary duplication of the object, as Husserl points out in his Ideas:

But if, in this way, we try to separate the actual Object (in the case of perception of something external, the perceived physical thing pertaining to Nature) and the intentional Object, including the latter as really inherently in the mental process as ‘immanent’ to the perception, we fall into the difficulty that now two realities ought to stand over against one another while only one reality is found to be present and possible. I perceive the physical thing, the Object belonging to Nature, the tree there in the garden; that and nothing else is the actual Object of the perceptual ‘intention.’ A second immanental tree, or even an ‘internal image’ of the actual tree standing out there before me, is in no way given, and to suppose that hypothetically leads to an absurdity. (Husserl 1982, 219 [Hua III/1, 207f]2)

Because of these problems Brentano eventually changed his account of intentionality. He never succeeded, however, in explaining the problems concerning the ontological status of the intentional object in a satisfactory way.3 Husserl, of course, also cannot provide an easy answer to the problems concerning the relation between the act of perception and the perceived object. With his phenomenological reduction he brackets the realm of physical objects and develops a position that he characterizes as transcendental idealism. I will discuss Husserl’s position in more detail below.